Meta

March 17th, 2017

“The impersonations on this YouTube posting were recorded in August ’85, when Bowie came in to do the lead vocal. At the end of the session, he broke into the impersonations and I realized that these might get erased at some point, so I quickly put a cassette in and hit ‘record.’ I wish we could hear the other side of the dialogue but unfortunately that wasn’t being recorded.”

“This electro-mechanical sound installation is based on the Roland DXY pen plotter, a discontinued printing technology of the 1980s, with this artefact combined alongside audio cassette tape technology in order to playback prerecorded ‘found’ sound recordings from a magnetically encoded audio tape surface.”

So: they repurposed an ink plotter, fitted it with a play head for magnetic tape, and now it plays random strips of recorded magnetic tape in a weird audio / art installation.

Kind of obscure but I like it. It reminds me a little of a musical R2-D2.